Sunshine (22 page)

I pushed open the French doors and went out and sat on my little balcony. It was a clear, quiet night with a bright quarter moon.

When Yolande had had mice in her kitchen I had set take-'em-alive traps and driven the results twenty miles away and released them in empty farmland. (Wards against wildlife are notoriously bad: hence the electric peanut-butter fence to keep the deer from eating Yolande's roses. And a house ward successful against mice and squirrels would be almost the money-spinner that a charm to let suckers walk around in daylight would be.) I couldn't kill anything larger than a housefly. I'd stopped putting spiders outdoors after I read somewhere that house spiders won't survive. When I dusted, I left occupied cobwebs alone. I hadn't drawn blood in anger since the seventh-grade playground wars.

I don't eat meat. I'm too squeamish. It all looks like dead animals to me. On the days I cover in the main kitchen, the only hot food is vegetarian.

Maybe my mother had successfully coerced and brainwashed her daughter into being a nice, human wimp.

But I'd blown it. I'd blown it when I'd turned my knife into a key, because it was the only way to stay alive. Because—maybe only because I didn't know any better—I wanted to stay alive. I looked down at my arms, at my hands cupping the tea mug, as if I would start growing scales or fur or warts—or turning blue—immediately. Most demon blood doesn't make you big or strong or blue though, whether it comes with magic ability or not. A lot of it makes you weaker or stupider. Or crazier.

I'd been doing okay as my mother's daughter. My life wasn't perfect, but whose was?

Yes, I'd always despised myself for being a coward. A wuss. So? There are worse things.

And then I had to drive out to the lake one night.

They'd started it. And I may be a wuss, but I've never liked bullies. Maybe, if it was all about to go horribly wrong, I could at least go out with a bang.

How cute and sweet and winsome and philosophically high-minded, that I didn't like bullies, that I wanted to go out with a bang. I was still a coward, I had a master vampire and his gang on my tail, I was all alone, and I was
way
out of my league.

“Oh, Constantine,” I whispered into the darkness. “What do I do now?”

I
SLEPT THE
moment my head touched the pillow, in spite of everything that had happened. It was very late for me though, and I'd had two generous shots of scotch. The alarm went off about three hours later. I woke strangely easily and peacefully. I can get by on six and a half hours, just, and only if I'm feeling lively generally, which I hadn't been lately. Three hours' sleep doesn't cut it under any conditions. But I sat up and stretched and didn't feel too bad. And I had the oddest sensation … as if someone had been in my bedroom with me. Given the events of the night before, this should have been panic stations, but it wasn't. It was a reassuring feeling, as if someone had been guarding me in my sleep.

Get a grip, Sunshine.

I had to get moving quickly however I was feeling, because it took so much longer to bicycle than to drive into town. But as it turned out, it didn't. When I went round to the shed to fetch Kenny's bike there was a car parked at the edge of the road, engine off, but SOF spotlight on, illuminating the SOF insignia on the door, and the face of the man leaning against the hood. Pat. “'Morning,” he said.

“We are
not
going to the lake at this hour,” I said, half scandalized and half disbelieving. “I am going to make cinnamon rolls and oatmeal bread and brownies and Butter Bombs, and you can call out the cavalry at about ten.”

“Sheer. I know you're going in to make cinnamon rolls. You want to be setting some aside to bring with you later on. The only good Monday is a holiday Monday when Charlie's is open. But we figured that Mel would bring you home last night which would leave you with only two unmotorized wheels this morning. And we don't want you tired this afternoon.”

Tired but alive would do, I thought. Dawn isn't for another hour and a half, and if I'm the first person to stake a sucker with a table knife I could be the first person to get plucked off a bicycle.… I had been thinking about this as I walked downstairs in the dark. Living alone has its advantages in terms of warding: your wards don't get confused, nor do they blunt as fast as they will if there are several of you. A big family with a lot of friends will go through wards like the Seddons through popcorn on Monday nights. And unless you are so fabulously wealthy that you can spend millions on made-to-order wards, there are always going to be some holes in the barrier. Someone living alone who isn't constantly having different people over can probably build up a pretty good, solid, home ward system. That's
probably
.

But wards are unstable at best, and they tend to blow up or fall over or go rogue or get their attributes crossed and morph into something else, almost certainly something you don't want, pretty easily, and generally speaking the more powerful they are the more likely they are to go nuts. And wards are the
sober
end of the charm family. Most of the rest of them are a lot worse. One of the most dependable ways to make a ward kali on you is to expect it to travel. All charms, including wards, that you wear next to your skin, are different—hence the perennial, if problematic, popularity of tattoos—but wards you hang at a distance have to stay put.

Consequently the eternally vexed question of warding your means of transportation. And while it's true that the chauffeur-driven limos of the global council are almost more ward than limo, it's also true that no council member travels anywhere without a human bodyguard stiff with technology, including to the corner store for a newspaper. If there are any global council members that live in neighborhoods with corner stores, which there probably aren't.

The irony is that the best transport ward for us ordinary schlemiels remains the confusing fact of motion itself. (There's a crucial maintenance speed of a little under ten mph. This is a
brisk
pedal on your bicycle and sensible joggers, if this isn't a contradiction in terms, get their exercise during the day. In the horse era a harness or riding horse that couldn't maintain a nine-mph clip for a useful distance was shot. This made horses short-lived and expensive and most people stayed at home after dark: but at least travel was possible.) The protection of movement is nothing like perfect, which is why they keep trying to create transport wards, but it exists—and thank the gods and angels for it, since without it I don't think there would be many sane humans left. There's only so much constant relentless constrictive dread you can live with. Anyway I knew to be grateful for it, but it had never made much sense, at least not till a vampire had told me
it is not the distance that is crucial, but the uniformity
and given me an inkling.

But what kind of homogeneity is it, about sucker senses? Had the goblin giggler's last sight of the human who offed him been
transmitted
anywhere?

I'd felt relatively safe inside my apartment. I had good wards, and you can kind of feel the presence of the screen they put up, that it's there, and there aren't any big drafts coming through it. And you feel it when you come out from behind it too.

But I'd never been able to bear a charm against my skin. They make me a total space cadet. I'd agreed to the key ring loop to make Mom feel good, and that was pushing it. Poor thing. It had probably been grateful to be drowned in the shower, last night, if it had survived the little incident shortly before.

I said to Pat unkindly, “You might have thought of that last night.”

He grinned, and opened the passenger door. I got in. “Why did you draw the short straw?”

“'Cause I'm best at going without sleep. My demon blood has its uses.”

There were at least two classes of demons who didn't sleep at all. My favorite is the Hildy demon, who gets all the sleep it needs during the blinking of its eyes. You'd think this would seriously interrupt any train of thought that takes longer to pursue than the time between one eye blink and another, but not to a Hildy. (They're called Hildies after Brunhilde, who slept for a very long time surrounded by fire. Hildies also breathe fire when they're peeved, although they're even-tempered as demons go.) Hildies aren't blue though.

I certainly couldn't get all the sleep I needed by blinking my eyes.

I stayed in the bakery all morning. Charlie and Mel kept everyone who didn't belong behind the counter on the far side, Mom answered more phone calls than usual and said “she has nothing to say” a lot. With the bakery door open I could sometimes hear conversations in the office. Mom is good at hanging up on people. It's one of her great assets as a small-business manager. (She and Consuela had lately been working up a good cop/bad cop routine that was a joy to eavesdrop on.) I had no idea what Charlie had told her about the events of the night before. I didn't want to know. But he must have told her something. Miraculously, she left me alone, although a particularly lurid new charm was waiting for me on my apron hook that morning. I left it there, glowering to itself. I like orange, but not in overdecorated feather whammies.

It wasn't as bad as it might have been by a long shot. I felt some grudging admiration for SOF.

Nobody tried to follow me when I left the coffeehouse at ten, or at least nobody but some of the overweight so-called wildlife that hangs around the pedestrian precinct and tries to cadge handouts from the weak-willed. They know a white bakery bag when they see one, and I was carrying a dozen cinnamon rolls. I swear some of our sparrows are too fat to fly, but the feral cats are too fat to catch them. And the squirrels should have had teeny-weeny skateboards to keep their bellies off the ground. One of the recent rumors about Mrs. Bialosky's neighborhood activities was that she ran a commando unit that protected us from some of Old Town's larger, more threatening wildlife, the rats and foxes and mutant deer that never shed their short but pointy horns. If Charlie's had had to keep
all
of that lot too fat to intimidate anybody we'd have gone out of business.

It was just Jesse and Pat today. They put me in the front seat—of an unmarked car—with Pat alone in the back. Jesse ate four cinnamon rolls and Pat ate five. I didn't think this was humanly possible—but then maybe it wasn't. I ate one. I'd had breakfast already. Twice. Ten o'clock is a long time from four in the morning.

We drove first to the old cabin. I was still clinging to that mysterious sense of someone keeping a protective eye on me, but I was beginning to feel a little rocky nonetheless. Maybe I should have brought the feather whammy instead of hiding it under my apron when I left. As the weed-pocked gravel of what had once been a driveway crunched under my feet, I put my hand in my pocket and closed it round my little knife. I had been not remembering what had happened two months ago so emphatically that the edges of my real memory had become a little indistinct. Standing on the ground where it had begun brought it horribly back. I looked at the porch, where I hadn't heard them coming from. I looked at the place where my car had no longer been, two days later.

I went down to the marshy reach near the shore, where the stream had run fifteen years ago. It didn't look like anybody had been there playing in the mud recently. I went back to the cabin.

“Yeah,” Pat was saying.

“But it's been a long time, and they haven't been back,” said Jesse.

They were just standing there, no gizmos in sight, no headsets, no wires, no portable com screens with flashing lights making beeping noises. I guessed it wasn't technology that was helping them draw their conclusions.

What a good thing Pat hadn't walked on my porch this morning, and up my stairs and knocked on my door and, maybe, walked into the front room where the same, if savagely stain-removed, sofa still stood, and the little square of carpet beside it, and maybe even the handle of the fridge door, the same handle that had been there ready to expose a carton of milk behind it if someone pulled on it, two months ago.

What a good thing that good manners dictate that you don't idly cross people's probable outer ward circle and knock on their doors unless invited.

Carthaginian hell.

We got back in the car and drove on the way we'd been going, north.

There was a bad spot almost at once. I picked it up first, or anyway I was the one who said, “Hey. I don't know about you, but I don't want to go any farther this way.”

“Roll up your windows,” said Jesse. He hit a couple of buttons on the very peculiar dashboard I was only now noticing and suddenly there was something like heavy body armor enclosing me, oppressive as chain mail and breastplate and a full-face helm, plume and lady's silk favor optional. I could almost smell the metal polish. “Ugh,” I said.

“Don't knock it, it works,” said Jesse. Our voices echoed peculiarly. We drove very slowly for about a minute and then a red light on the dashboard blinked and there was a manic chirping like a parakeet on speed. “Right. We're clear.” He hit the same buttons. The invisible armor went away.

“Spartan, isn't it?” said Pat.

“No,” I said.

We drove through two more bad spots like that and I hated the body armor program worse each time. It made me feel trapped. It made me feel as if when I woke up again I'd be sitting at the edge of a bonfire with a lot of vampires on the other side.

It was a long drive. Thirty miles or so. I remembered.

Then we reached a really bad spot. Jesse hit his buttons again but this time it really
was
like being trapped—held down while Things slid through the intangible gaps between the incorporeal links, reached out long taloned fingers and grabbed me.…

Big. Huge space. Indoors; ceiling up there somewhere. Old factory. Scaffolding where the workers had once tended the machines. No windows. Enormous square ventilator shafts, vast parasitic humps of silent machinery, contortions of piping like the Worm Ouroboros in its death throes.…